Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor
- Submitting institution
-
Liverpool Hope University
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- dSH14C
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Springer International Publishing
- ISBN
- 978-3-319-95471-4
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- November
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- 29 - Classics
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
-
1
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor is a long-form output, documenting a sustained research effort, and the generation of an extended and complex piece of research. It presents new critical insights into the ahistoric and misleading synthesis of Aristotle and Stanislavski which (it is contended) frequently constrains meaningful creative engagement with tragedy within contemporary actor-training. The authors’ articulation of this original argument emerges from an extended and multi-layered process of creative investigation, including lengthy periods of pedagogic experiment, as well as twelve production projects over more than a decade.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Written in a style designed to engage an audience including students, professional actors, and theatre directors, Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor nonetheless articulates significant research insights, aiming to radically unsettle some fundamental assumptions which have traditionally shaped rehearsal-room encounters with the surviving tragedies of fifth-century Athens.
Chapter 2 (The Aristotle Legacy) and Chapter 3 (The Stanislavski Legacy) set out to demonstrate that ahistorical readings of Aristotle’s Poetics, in combination with popular misunderstandings of Stanislavski’s theatre pedagogy, have given rise a series of now canonical mis-readings of ancient tragedy, limiting the contemporary actor’s ability to engage effectively with the challenges presented by ancient plays. (For a concise summary of this argument see pp.8-9.)
On the basis of this interdisciplinary research inquiry, new insights for practice are articulated across four subsequent chapters (Acting Sound, Acting Myth, Acting Space, and Acting Chorus). These re-interpret the surviving texts of tragedy as multi-modal performance scores, inviting the creation of multiple integrated, psychophysical acting approaches across a range of contemporary settings and contexts.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
